The Best Present of All

Telephone hand set: $12 at a garage saleCable phone for long distance: $48/mo.An hour on the phone with my niece: priceless

Mind you, this is the niece that I "didn't get along with" for years. I think part of that is that we're so much both embodying too much "sisu" -- a family trait. Recently, we've actually connected.

And found that we're so much alike... We've been catching up on fourty years of disconnection, over the past couple years. This was a totally awesome phone call. I got to tell her a lot of family stuff that my father shared with me but not with her. We are thinking we need to get together for a weekend, sometime.

And a Happy Solstice to all. It's my birthday, and one of the most major holidays in Finland: Summer Solstice. (Pay no attention to the Christians who moved it to the 24th to coincide with St. John's Day.)